Recommendation 3

At-Large Support Staff should be more actively involved in supporting the policy work of the ALAC, drafting position papers and other policy related work based on ALAC input. Staff competencies should be adjusted accordingly.

Staff resources are disproportionately concentrated on administrative support. Staff should have greater capacity to support preparation of policy advice.

Status: Accept in principle

Comment: In other parts of ICANN, particularly those which generate large and substantive documents, staff plays a key role in such drafting, but explicitly at the bidding of the volunteer community. Much of ALAC's outputs are far less massive and the need for such support is lessened. At-Large Staff does support this activity and that is expected to grow. At-Large does require additional support for communications with its members within ALSes and RALOs, and for creating records of its meetings and discussions are under way to address this.

==

The ALAC agrees with this recommendation. Currently, an ICANN At-Large Staff member edits and “cleans up” documents drafted by volunteers and in several cases has created the initial draft based on instructions from community members. Similarly, but on a larger scale, staff are the main content creators of the planned regular messages outlining policy activity that will be sent to individual and ALS members. This is of course dependent on ICANN management making the appropriate resources available.